Product Guides

The fashion industry is the second biggest polluter in the world. Major brands are exploiting garment workers and harming the environment in the production of shoes and clothing. However, there has been a rise in sustainable fashion brands, making everything from sportswear to underwear who are putting people and the planet before profit.

Product Guides

As food & drink prices continue to rise across the world, it is often the producers and workers who are losing out to big corporations. We shine a light on the food sovereignty movement pushing for a fairer food system that supports local business and we comment on the rise of veganism.

Product Guides

Many of the issues from our homes & garden are often hidden from the consumer, from toxic chemicals in our cleaning products to pesticides in our garden. We look at the greenest way to wash, clean and cook and how to recycle your old appliances.

The mainstream banking & insurance industries continue to invest in shady investments such as fossil fuels and nuclear weapons. However, a growing number of ethical alternatives makes it easier than ever to switch to a sustainable bank account or pick an insurance company with an ethical policy.

We look at shops or online platforms that sell a range of products, and how they tend to dominate the market by implementing a profit-first business model and by having a lacklustre approach to ethical practice. We also celebrate ethical companies offering an alternative, from online retailers to sustainable fashion brands.

Product Guides

The tech sector is plagued by reports of tax avoidance, corporate lobbying and the use of conflict minerals. We look at the brands proving that technology can be made ethically, from Fairphone to Green ISP.

Product Guides

Are you a lover of the outdoors? Unfortunately the companies that provide your outdoor gear & transport are often harming the environment; from car companies cheating emission tests to outdoor gear companies using toxic chemicals that damage the environment. We provide practical information for consumers on how to keep your ethics while you travel.

Oppressive Regimes and their Allies

Ethical Consumer was propelled into being over twenty years ago by the boycott of South Africa and the pressing need for citizens around the world to take a stand against apartheid.

We have used economic support for oppressive regimes as a barometer of corporate social responsibility ever since, and companies with operations in such countries are penalised under our rating system.

The rationale behind this is straightforward: companies benefit from the very conditions which contribute to oppression, such as harsh labour conditions, lax environmental regulations and an economic environment conducive to corruption and tax avoidance. Furthermore, trading with a regime helps to make it financially viable. Oppressive regimes are supported by a series of economic ties without which they would not survive. Foreign investment is a crucial element of this.

Business Complicit

The levels of corporate engagement with such regimes have become not just an embarrassment, but a threat to companies themselves. A reputational risk that could ultimately hit companies where it hurts: their profits. In May 2011 the campaign group Global Witness released a leaked document that revealed where the Gaddafi regime had stashed its cash, including $292 million in the high street bank HSBC.[1]

PepsiCo, Nestlé and Procter & Gamble, invested millions in Egypt during the now-reviled Mubarak regime. Egypt was the second biggest recipient of foreign direct investment in Africa, trumped only by Angola - a country where human rights are violated with impunity and where the disparities in wealth are enormous.

We are living in times of immense geo-political change. Government oppression and corruption has ignited protest movements across the Middle East and North Africa, whilst people in the industrialised North are taking to the streets in fury over corporate tax evasion. The links between corporations and oppressive regimes are easier to spot now than they ever have been. Meanwhile, Wikileaks has exploded the walls shrouding secret “diplomacy,” revealing massive complicity and collusion of powerful states in the oppression of people around the world.

Companies, particularly with brands in more ethically sensitive markets such the UK, are all too aware of the need to avoid consumer backlashes. They have, and will, respond to consumer pressure. Which presents us with an invaluable means of affecting change.

Supply chain issues

Companies do not need to have direct operations in oppressive regimes to benefit from, and be implicated in, human rights abuses. In the supply chains of a huge proportion of products on our supermarket shelves there are endemic human rights abuses. Forced child labour is used to produce cocoa in West Africa and cotton in Uzbekistan.

Computers, mobile phones and other digital equipment are likely to contain 'conflict minerals', which feed violence in Africa. Palm oil, an ingredient used in an estimated 43 of Britain's 100 best-selling grocery brands, is implicated in land rights abuses of indigenous people in many areas of the world. Some of the world's worst human rights abuses are fuelled by the demands of Western consumer markets, and the companies selling such products rarely have obligations to eliminate such practices.

The responsibility for this situation lies not solely with companies, but an international trading system in which self-regulation and voluntary, non-binding commitments of companies are continually presented as adequate measures to protect against abuses.

This system, developed and perpetuated by the powerful countries of the North, serves to entrench the economic supremacy of the minority over the dignity and human rights of people in economically poor, but often resource-rich, countries. Countries that do not appear on the list therefore cannot wash their hands of the abuses that take place in the countries that are.

British problems

In this context, two issues are worth highlighting regarding the United Kingdom.

The Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, on its way through parliament at the time of writing, will make it practically impossible for victims of corporate crimes committed by British companies in the global South to seek justice in the courts because they won’t be able to access the funds required.

Secondly, 91% of the value of arms sale transfers from the UK between 2004 and 2007 were with 'developing' countries, on a par with arms exports from Russia (96%) and China (100%). In contrast, arms transfers to developing countries accounted for 50% of sales from the USA and 54% from France.[2] Brutal repression of citizens in oppressive regimes is carried out with the weaponry and torture equipment exported by countries that claim to respect human rights.

The very concept of an oppressive regime, usually taken to describe the actions of a state towards its citizens, is in itself problematic: It excludes analysis of a state's actions towards non-citizens and its actions extra-territorially.

Abuses perpetrated against the most vulnerable people - refugees and citizens living in war zones – often don’t appear in the statistics. Furthermore, the majority of data used to generate the list specifically refers to human rights abuses carried out by the state – it does not, for example assess human rights abuses carried out by non-state armed groups.

Therefore where state control of its territory is weak the potential exposure of individuals to human rights abuses may not be reflected simply by the oppressiveness of the state. Consequently, the list published here does not provide a complete picture of human rights in the world.

To generate the list, data was sorted into 10 categories, producing an overall score out of 10. Countries which scored more than six were included in the list, with the exception of Egypt, Tunisia and Guinea (see below). The period the data relates to is 2009-2010.

The first five categories relate to the physical harm of citizens and political imprisonment, and the last five relate to civil rights. The categories were selected in order to reflect a reasonably holistic view of the country, with a slight weighting towards issues particularly relevant to the operations of companies. Limitations were inevitable as a result of lack of systematic, global data. Omissions include the treatment of minority groups and women, and sexual violence perpetrated by state forces.

Exclusions

A shorter version of this article first went to print in Ethical Consumer magazine in June 2011, a time during which the political landscape was shifting dramatically. A decision was taken to exclude three countries from the final list despite the fact they scored highly enough, because they were undergoing, or had recently undergone, significant regime changes.

In February 2011 mass demonstrations in Egypt lead to the ousting of Hosni Mubarak, who had been President for 30 years, and the military assuming control of the country. In Tunisia, a revolution cumulated in Prime Minister Ben Ali being forced into exile in January 2011 after 23 years of rule. In September 2009, a peaceful pro-democracy demonstration in Guinea's capital, Conakry, ended in the brutal massacre of over 150 people, and the savage gang rape of dozens of women at the hands of Guinea's military. Since then, Moussa Dadis Camara, the former self-proclaimed President and head of the military, has stepped down, and the country has begun the transition from military to civilian rule, with the first democratic election in December 2010.

In these cases it was felt that it was unsuitable to use the 2009-2010 data to provide an accurate picture of the current regimes. Furthermore, as inclusion on the list results in negative scoring for companies in Ethical Consumer’s rating system, it would have the potentially perverse result of penalising companies newly investing in economic activity in those countries.

In selecting six as a cut-off point above which countries are classified as oppressive, we have generated a list that includes roughly a quarter of the countries assessed. The remaining countries were further grouped into three bands, as represented on the map. These bands also represented roughly a quarter of countries. Six as a cut-off point also ensures that a country will have picked up at least one mark in both the first five and the last five categories. In so doing we have avoided the (possibly theoretical) situation where a country appears on the list if it doesn't perpetrate physical harm or political imprisonment.

However, Ethical Consumer recognises that the cut off point selected will always, in some sense, be arbitrary. Countries which narrowly avoided being on the list, scoring six, were: Angola, Azerbaijan, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Guatamala, Indonesia, Rwanda and Uganda.

Ten categories were selected to generate a final score for each country:

Physical harm inflicted by states

Four of these relate to 'physical integrity rights' - that is, the rights of citizens to be free from torture, political imprisonment, disappearance and extra-judicial killing. This data has been generated by the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Dataset (www.humanrights.org), which in turn is sourced from the 2009 United States State Department Country Reports and Amnesty International Report.

Where specific instances of human rights abuse have been recorded between one and 49 times during 2009, the country gets a half mark; over 50 instances lead to a full mark.

The fifth category, the death penalty, is closely related to physical integrity rights. Data on this category has been taken from Amnesty International's 2011 report and the Hands Off Cain website (www.handsoffcain.info), an organisation calling for the abolition of the death penalty. CIRI data on human rights does not include analysis of capital punishment as it is not illegal under international law. According to CIRI Director Dr David Richards, “We try to reduce any possible inclusionary-based politics by coding only those rights we see as being clearly recognized in international law.” [3]

Half a mark in this category represents countries which are abolitionist in practice but the death penalty remains in law, or where execution is reserved for exceptional circumstances, such as crimes under military law or wartime crimes. A full mark indicates that the death penalty is used for ordinary crimes.

Civil Rights

The last five categories relate to civil rights. The final three of these have been selected because they are specifically relevant to the purposes of this research, thus giving the final score a natural weighting towards issues around corporate activity.

The Freedom in the World rating is from Freedom House, which describes itself as an “independent watchdog organization that supports the expansion of freedom around the world”, based in the USA. It annually publishes country scores that reflect civil rights and political liberties, derived from a survey completed for each country by analysts and academic advisors. It measures the wider conditions of freedom in countries and territories, rather than governments or government performance per se. A full mark in this category represents the assessment of the country as “not free”, a half mark “partly free” and no mark “free”.

Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontiers) produce an annual Press Freedom Index, which provides a country-by-country ranking of violations of press freedom. It “reflects the degree of freedom that journalists and news organisations enjoy in each country, and the efforts made by the authorities to respect and ensure respect for this freedom”. Abuses by pressure groups, armed militia and clandestine organisations are taken into account alongside those attributable to the state. To compile the score, a questionnaire covering issues such as physical abuse and detention, censorship, self-censorship and financial pressure is distributed to RSF’s partner organisations and network of correspondents. Ethical Consumer chose to include this index as a measure that comes from grassroots civil society, as opposed to academic, state or organised labour institutions. In 2010, Eritrea was the worst scoring country under this index, scoring 105. Ethical Consumer has translated the scoring system as follows, where 0 represents the most free:

The score provided in the Workers' Rights column is also based on Freedom House data, from a subset of questions in the Freedom House survey relating to workers' rights, published in a separate document, “The Global State of Workers' Rights”. This section of data has therefore been double counted. Ethical Consumer considered this to be appropriate given how we use the information. The survey measures trade union and worker freedoms in 165 countries. It is also claimed that the final score attributed to countries is a measure of how closely labour laws conform to International Labour Organization (ILO) standards.

The following scoring method was used in the workers' rights category to convert Freedom House (FH) rankings into a score for Ethical Consumer’s (ECRA) oppressive regime list:

Data in the column Trade Unionists Targeted has been taken from the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR) Freedom of Association: Trade Union Rights Worldwide 2010 map. A half mark represents instances where trade unionists arrested were imprisoned or prosecuted and a full mark represents instances where they have been killed or assassinated.

The Corruption Perceptions Index, developed by Transparency International, measures perceived levels of public sector corruption in a country. To compile this, an evaluation of the extent of corruption is conducted by country experts (residents and non-residents) and business leaders. Data from 13 sources and 10 independent institutions is used to generate the Index. Source surveys for the 2010 CPI were conducted between January 2009 and September 2010.

Sources and categories

Human rights is a complex issue and there are multiple related measures and indexes, but sources of raw, core data on human rights are surprisingly limited.

The United States State Department (USSD) is the only source of country data that is both systematic and global in coverage, with the exception that it does not report on itself. There are obvious problems with this that relate to impartiality. Whilst CIRI Co-Director David Richards acknowledges that “fear of bias makes sense”, and that bias was an issue in the early days of the reports, he argues that the growth of independent sources for information in the form of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has made it difficult for obvious bias to be present. He notes that studies that have coded USSD and Amnesty reports separately “show a great and growing correlation”. CIRI have also put in place their own safeguards against bias in the form of using concordance software which allows it to detect changes in language: “Our scorers create scores based on information, not merely upon changes in the way something is described”.[3]

To compile its data on the USA, CIRI use multiple non-governmental organisations as sources, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

It should also be noted that the impartiality of Freedom House has also been questioned, and that it has been criticised for its links to, and for receiving funding from, the US Government, not least by Noam Chomsky in his book “Manufacturing Dissent”. A statement on the organisation’s website makes its political orientation explicit: “Freedom House’s diverse Board of Trustees is united in the view that American leadership in international affairs is essential to the causes of human rights and democracy”.

A less obvious problem than bias with respect to the USSD country reports is the influence of the value reference system which dictates what type of information is reported. During the Reagan administration, analysis of economic rights was eliminated. According to Richards, this has resulted in the continued legacy of scarce systematic information on economic, social, cultural and women's rights compared to that of political and civil rights.[4] Salil Shetty, in his introduction to Amnesty International's State of the World's Human Rights 2011 Report, describes elevating political and civil rights over economic, social and cultural rights as a false dichotomy. He highlights the experience of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in protest against police harassment and economic hardship. Recognition that lack of economic opportunities is caused in part by corrupt governments continues to reverberate across North Africa and the Middle East.

However, for the purposes of this research, too much emphasis on economic rights and factors that are inextricably linked to them, such as child mortality, literacy rates and life expectancy, would generate a list reflecting poverty and living standards rather than the actions of states towards their citizens. Richards warns against the “classic trap of punishing poor states for being poor” when attempting to measure human rights.[4] So, whilst economic rights do not feature in the categories we have selected, we have instead used a measurement of government corruption, the Corruption Perceptions Index.

Non-Citizens

Analysis of the human rights performance of governments tends to focus solely on the actions of state or state-employed forces towards citizens of that country. Legally and morally, this can lead to a massive void, whereby non-citizens, be they refugees, asylum seekers, migrant workers or victims of trafficking, are utterly unrecognised . This is where some of the worst abuses take place, in a place between states, often inhabited by the most vulnerable. Many countries, including the UK, now forcibly deport to countries where individuals are at genuine risk of torture and ill-treatment, in violation of international legal principles. In “developed” countries, it is commonplace to detain non-citizens, including children, outside of usual legal processes. Ill-treatment of such people is also commonplace.

This presents a substantial problem for human rights analysis. To take the most extreme example discovered during the course of this research, between September 2009 and January 2010, 12,000 Congolese nationals were forcibly deported from Angola amid human rights violations, including torture and sexual violence. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that 99 women and 15 men were raped during the expulsions. Many arrived in the DRC naked and without belongings.

If the treatment of refugees and other non-citizens is to be incorporated into a comparative analysis of human rights globally, it needs to be done so systematically. But sources of such information are not available.

The data also does not reflect the behaviour of states in armed conflict beyond their borders – the actions of one government towards citizens of another country.

Occupied and Disputed Territories

Occupied territories presented further problems during this research. Different data sources treated different territories differently and therefore aggregating the data without making allowances for this would lead to skewed results. This is pertinent to two regions: the Moroccan occupied Western Sahara; and the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel. Furthermore, how they are treated represents a particular political position; neutrality is impossible, and even after a position has been adopted, representing this statistically is extremely difficult. We don’t claim to have ‘solved’ these problems, but are committed to being transparent in how we have dealt with them.

There are multiple disputed territories, with varying degrees of recognition internationally. Abkhazia, which is generally considered to be part of Georgia, is recognised by five UN member states, one partially recognised state (South Ossetia) and one unrecognised state (Transnistria). Each disputed or occupied territory, or independence struggle – however it is presented - deserves separate analysis far beyond the scope of this research.

The availability of data obviously restricts to what extent it is possible to analyse territories separately. No separate data is available on Tibet, for example.

If one accepts that an occupied or disputed territory has legitimate claims to sovereignty, an inherent paradox exists when dealing with the data. If the region is treated as a separate entity, the result is to exonerate the occupying forces of responsibility for the condition of human rights there and any human rights abuses they may be responsible for. Conversely, to include the data for human rights abuses in occupied territories with those of the occupier effectively involves including that geographical area, thus could be seen to legitimise the occupiers claim to the land.

The CIRI data incorporates human rights abuses committed by Israeli forces in the Palestinian occupied territories into its Israel dataset. We have not adjusted these scores. CIRI does not, however, include Palestine, the West Bank or Gaza as separate entities, consequently no data is provided relating to the human rights conduct of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.

In contrast, no data on the Western Sahara is included in any of the CIRI statistics – either for Morocco or as a separate entity. Richards explains that the database relates to state-citizen relations, as this is the predominant relationship in international human rights law. Since the Western Sahara's legal status remains undetermined, and there is no recognised state government, it is not covered at all.[5]

The Freedom House data scores the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Western Sahara as separate entities. The scores of these regions are worse than Israel and Morocco respectively. In both cases, the occupied regions score worse: Israel is considered to be ‘free’ in the Freedom House categorisation, Morocco ‘partly free’ and the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Western Sahara ‘not free’. We have changed Israel and Morocco's status to ‘not free’ for the purposes of incorporating FH rating into our own and to reflect conditions in the territories in which they occupy. In the case of Israel, this is line with the position taken by the UN, which does not accept Israel’s territorial claims in the Palestinian occupied territories, but states that "the [Israeli] State's obligations under the Covenant [on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights] apply to all territories and populations under its effective control”.[6]

The Press Freedom Index was the only source to score ‘Israel (Israeli territory)’ and ‘Israel (extra-territorial)’ separately, thus allowing it to account for the arrest of journalists in international waters on the flotilla heading to Gaza in May 2010, and the targeting of journalists by Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. We have used the ‘extra-territorial’ score. The difference in these scores is significant: Israel ranked 86 out of 172 countries; its extra-territorial ranking was 132. The Press Freedom Index did not release separate information on the Western Sahara.

In the case of the Freedom House Workers' Rights score, this approach was not possible as the organisation did not release separate data on the Western Sahara and Palestinian territories. The Moroccan workers' rights score has consequently not been adjusted.

However, in the case of Israel, we decided to attempt to incorporate working conditions in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, illegal under international law, and also the conditions of Palestinian workers with West Bank residency permits working in Israel. This is partly due to the dire working conditions they experience and also because companies that source from Israel run the very real risk of sourcing from settlements. Many agricultural and industrial products and their components exported from Israel are produced in the settlements, some of which are industrial zones. Although the Israeli state has signed an agreement with European countries that it will label products with their place of origin, companies often conceal the source of products.[7] In February 2010 the European Union ruled that importing states should not be bound by the proof of origin submitted if it did not contain sufficient information to be verified, a ruling which Press TV interpreted as a declaration that the certificates of origin were not trustworthy.[8] In France a year later, a court official charged with investigating imports by Israeli agricultural company Carmel Agrexco at the port at Sete found evidence of fraud due to incorrect labelling of settlement produce.[9] It is also worth noting that in May 2011 Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated that Israel does not recognise the internationally recognised 1967 border.

We took the questions asked by Freedom House which it uses to determine the status of workers’ rights in a country and attempted to 'answer' them with regard to Palestinian workers working in areas controlled by Israel. We found that the specific questions asked only related to ILO Conventions 87, the Freedom of Association and the Protection of Right to Organise and 98, the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining. Whilst these two conventions are generally considered to be critical in terms of workers being able to challenge and improve working conditions, it was somewhat surprising that information was not systematically sought regarding other issues, such as child labour, forced labour, working hours, working conditions and remuneration. Such issues were reported in the written country reports, however, the methodology employed to obtain the information was unclear.

We found that, due to the extra-ordinary conditions experienced by many Palestinian workers, attempting to answer the questions was a fairly futile exercise. We put them to the Israeli workers' rights organisation Kav LaOved, and received the following response from Roy Wagner:

“Workers in Israel, including Palestinians working in Israel or in Israeli West Bank settlements have all the formal freedoms of forming unions, with the exception of access of Palestinian union activists to places where they are not themselves employed, as they are not likely to have permits. Moreover, since a few years ago Palestinian workers in Israel and the settlements have almost the same rights and benefits as Israeli workers.

“However, the Israeli permit regime renders these freedoms strictly formal. In order to work in Israel or in an Israeli settlement, a Palestinian worker needs a security clearance and a work permit. The process of obtaining a work permit often includes a summons to a meeting with an Israeli security agent, who may require the worker to provide information to Israeli authorities in exchange for the right to work - a choice that may place the worker and his or her family at risk. Furthermore, the permit does not belong to the worker, but to the employer. Workers who fall out of grace with their employer for any reason whatsoever (or those whose employer failed to pay the authorities their work permit fee) lose not only their job, but also their work permit and possibly even their security clearance.

“Last but not least, Israeli enforcement of worker rights, including health and safety, although formally applicable, is non-existent. Palestinian workers often end up with less than half the minimum wage, denied all social benefits, and in dangerous work environments. Workers are able to obtain their rights only through a court process, after they are fired or resign (and even then there are many formal and informal obstacles) or through external pressure, in cases where the employer has to maintain a good international reputation. Unions do organize Palestinians in Israel and Israeli settlements, but their ability to make a difference is very limited.”

Wagner concluded: “The formal rights of workers are meaningless where there are mechanisms (such as motion restrictions, limitations on access to justice, limitations on the right to work) that make it impossible for workers to effectively unionize. Freedom House should phrase questions that try to reach beyond the existence of formal rights and into the actual possibility of implementing them effectively.”[10]

Who Profits, an Israeli organisation that monitors industrial activity in West Bank settlements, further elaborates in their 2011 report on the SodaStream factory in Mishor Edomim industrial zone in a settlement in the West Bank: “Exploitation is an inevitable part of commercial production in an occupied area. Palestinians employed in these industrial parks work under severe restrictions of movement and organization... employment under occupation is always exploitative, resulting in routine violations of labor rights.”[11]

We have therefore re-scored Israel in the workers' rights category as being “very repressive” under Freedom House’s rating. It is perhaps worth noting that this element of Israel's score is not in itself sufficient to push Israel onto this list of oppressive regimes.

Reflections

This research has been a complicated process that has thrown up numerous moral and logical difficulties. We don't claim to have come up with perfect solutions, but are committed to being transparent in our methodology and open to suggestions of how to improve the process the next time the research to compile the Oppressive Regime list is undertaken. We'd particularly like to hear about potential alternatives to Freedom House as a source!

We hope that one day the fundamental problem – the availability of global, systematic data on human rights in the world – is solved by crowd sourcing. Grassroots civil society across the world has a crucial role to play in reporting human rights abuses. How such information could be aggregated is a question for another day.

The categories that relate to physical integrity rights as defined in the Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project Coding Manual are reproduced below with kind permission by Dr. David Richards and Dr. David Cingranelli.

Column 1: Disappearances

Disappearances are cases in which people have disappeared, agents of the state are likely responsible, political motivation may be likely, and the victims (the disappeared) have not been found. In most instances, disappearances occur because of a victim's political involvement or knowledge of information sensitive to authorities. Often, victims are referred to by governments as "terrorists," and labelled a threat to national security. Knowledge of the whereabouts of the disappeared is, by definition, not public knowledge. However, while there is typically no way of knowing where victims are, it is typically known by whom they were taken and under what circumstances. Cases where people disappear for a period of time and then later re-appear are also to be counted.

In many instances, victims are taken under false pretence, such as having been taken away for questioning due to suspicion of some political action that is in opposition of the government. There are some cases of persons that are held under the circumstance of “clandestine detention.” These are prisoners that are known to be in custody but their whereabouts are not known. Since the whereabouts of clandestine detainees are not known, they should be counted among the disappeared.

Column 2: Political and Other Extra-judicial Killings/ Arbitrary or Unlawful Depravation of Life

Extrajudicial killings are killings by government officials without due process of law. They include murders by private groups if instigated by government. These killings may result from the deliberate, illegal, and excessive use of lethal force by the police, security forces, or other agents of the state whether against criminal suspects, detainees, prisoners, or others. Deaths resulting from torture should be counted, as these deaths occurred while the prisoners were in the custody of government or its
agents. Deaths from military hazing also count.

In most cases, the US State Department [USSD] and Amnesty International [AI] reports indicate cases of political killings by explicitly referring to these killings as "political." A victim of politically-motivated killing is someone who was killed by a government or its agents as a result of his or her involvement in political activities or for supporting (implicitly or explicitly) the political actions of opposition movements against the existing government.

While they may be the result of different motives, both extrajudicial killings and political killings are to be treated identically for the purposes of coding.

Column 3: Political prisoners

Political imprisonment refers to the incarceration of people by government officials because of: their speech; their non-violent opposition to government policies or leaders; their religious beliefs; their non-violent religious practices including proselytizing; or their membership in a group, including an ethnic or racial group. Amnesty International (AI) often refers to "prisoners of conscience." A "prisoner of conscience" is someone who was imprisoned because of his or her beliefs. A political prisoner is a prisoner of conscience. Prisoners of conscience also include prisoners that are imprisoned as a result of their religious beliefs, or practices. AI sometimes makes distinctions between political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, but for our purposes they are the same. Be aware that in many instances political prisoners are classified as terrorists and threats to national security. Many governments routinely apply the label "terrorist" to all opposition movements.

Column 4: Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Torture refers to the purposeful inflicting of extreme pain, whether mental or physical, by government officials or by private individuals at the instigation of government officials. This includes the use of physical and other force by police and prison guards that is cruel, inhuman, or degrading, and deaths in custody due to tangible negligence by government officials. For purposes of coding this variable, torture DOES NOT include general prison conditions, including whether these conditions meet minimum
international standards. Torture can be anything from simple beatings, to other practices such as water-boarding, rape, or administering shock or electrocution as a means of getting information, or a forced confession. Torture also takes into account intentional mental abuse of those in custody. Military hazing also counts as torture.

Acknowledgments

This research was made possible by the generous funding of the Scurrah Wainwright Charity.